Conneva.com

Literally, a pain in the neck

Mark — Thu, 20 Nov 2008 13:54:20 +0000

Originally posted Tuesday, June 08, 2004

Literally, a pain in the neck

The brain damage required to expose IS Flow services as document literal or Soap Message style web services is in sharp contrast to the ease with which you can create Soap RPC web services using Integration Server.

I generally recommend using document literal web services to my clients because they offer more explicit control over error generation, ability to validate the schema(s) associated with the soap messages before processing its payload and the ability to log the raw soap messages received from the business partner or internal customer.

However, the work required to create and test the wrapper services that extract and validate the soap body elements, convert the body into the correct inputs for the “wrapped” service and then map the outputs of that service (or exceptions it throws) into a valid soap response is far beyond what is reasonable to expect developers to do these days.

I’ve toyed with the idea of creating a few utility services to make creating the wrapper service much, much easier, but knowing that WM is planning on replacing the IS soap stack with Glue over the next several releases, that might be a lot of wasted effort.

Generating a WSDL that will invoke your wrapper service is also harder than it should be. For some reason, you can’t just refer to the input and output documents of your wrapped service. You have to create a new document type that contains a “holder” document type. That document type contains only one child, a document reference to the document type you really want to use. When you inspect the generated WSDL the holder document is there, but when you generate a Flow or java client from the WSDL the method only uses the input document of the wrapped service.

BTW, my favorite way to generate Glue java clients from WSDL files is to use Eclipse with the Glue plugins. Just create a new Glue project and then add a web reference. The new web reference wizard prompts you for the location of the WSDL and generates the classes you need. Just add a new class with a main method to invoke your web service and you’re set. Easy!

Mark

Photos from IW2008 in Miami

Mark — Thu, 06 Nov 2008 15:14:30 +0000

Here are a few photos from IW 2008 taken from my iPhone

Blogging from iPhone

Mark — Thu, 24 Jul 2008 13:34:34 +0000

Apple’s recent upgrade to the iPhone software introduced the ability to install applications from the AppStore. One of the free apps allows users to access and update their WorsPress blogs from the iPhone.

The absence of cut and paste and a larger keyboard will keep the iPhone from being a great blogging tool, but it’s handy for quick updates

Mark

Bull Elk in Velvet

Mark — Thu, 24 Jul 2008 13:33:49 +0000

Caught this critter on my way home Monday night about two miles from home

Wordpress Migration

Mark — Sun, 20 Apr 2008 00:24:20 +0000

The original Conneva.com website was based on an old version of Movable Type. Since I have been helping friends setup Wordpress blogs for some time now, I decided it was finally time to migrate the Conneva web site and blog to WP as well.

I have a little work to do on the header images and sidebar nav, but the posts have been ported and its working.

Mark

Hong Kong Phooey

Mark — Sun, 02 Apr 2006 00:40:00 +0000

Hong Kong Phooey was one of my favorite Saturday morning cartoons when I was growing up. There were only 16 episodes ever made, but I must have seen them all more than a few times.

Back in the real world, I just returned from a two-week webMethods consulting assignment in Hong Kong. My wife joined me after the project was over for a few days of vacation.

I took this photo from Victoria Peak on a foggy evening after we enjoyed a great dinner there.

I enjoyed the big city life of Hong Kong and was truly impressed by how late the sidewalks and restaurants are crowded with people. At 11:30 PM there are still hundreds of people going about their normal routines.

However, after living in the wide open west of Colorado for over 10 years, I must admit that I found the relative quiet of Stanley Village and Repulse Bay much more enjoyable.

Update: Several months ago, I was contacted by someone from the French publication Nature & Progrèsfor permission to use the “Hong Kong Island at Night” photo in a future edition of their magazine. My only request was to be given credit for the photo and to receive a copy of the magazine when it was published. Well, it arrived last week. Wow, does that mean I am a published photographer now? I need to add that to my resume!

Suishi USB Drive

Mark — Sat, 01 Apr 2006 17:36:35 +0000

Now this seems like something for the techno-geek who has everything!

Recent project work

Mark — Sat, 11 Mar 2006 09:49:24 +0000

New project, new functional domain. Wildfire incident management.

I have been updating the design of my custom SOAP processor for webMethods Integration Server to add support for XML Signature and XML Encryption. I’m also adding support for additional WS-Security token types to include X509CertificateTokens.

The project calls for using LDAP-based authentication to authenticate service consumers. Since LDAP authentication requires plain text passwords, using tokens containing only password digests in wsse:PasswordDigest format won’t do the trick. I’m considering building a very simple Security Token Service (STS) that would issue tokens (over SSL) that would contain encrypted user credentials as well as other desired user attributes. When supplied on subsequent service requests the tokens could be decrypted and used to authenticate against LDAP or the STS could be called again by the custom soap processor to validate the token.

In the last couple of months, I’ve also joined and become a voting member of the OASIS Emergency Management TC. The TC is working on finalizing the EDXL DistributionElement standard which we will probably use as an envelope for the payload of our Soap messages. The TC is also working on EDXL-RM which will eventually describe a set of emergency management resource managemnet messages that will be useful in ordering and assigning resources to various types of incidents such as wildfires, hurricanes or the inevitable avian flu outbreak.

We’re finally getting some much needed snow here in the foothills of Colorado so hopefully we’ll avoid burning down this summer. It’s tempting to add some trap doors to the web services I’m working on to sramble an entire squadron of air tankers to any fire that is close to our house. I guess it woudl look a bit suspicous with that many planes and helos circling over one house though!
The wMUsers software migration went very well and the response from the webMethods user community has been great with over 800 new user registrations and nearly 2000 active users since the move and higher message activity levels than ever before.

wMUsers software migration

Mark — Thu, 26 Jan 2006 22:41:56 +0000

This past weekend, I finally pulled the trigger on the migration to new forum software and a new hosting provider at wMUsers.com. The combination of the new vBulletin-powered forums and HostingMatters plus a little custom style design from Sekimori have been a great improvement.

All in all things have gone very well. There are still a few broken links to fix and a handful of users have not been able to reset their passwords. However we’ve had almost 100 new registrations in the last 4 days (a new record, I think) and the activity levels very healthy.

Thanks to Rob, Ray, Chris, Saurbh, Igor, Mark, Ramesh and all of the other regulars for the great feedback and your continued valuable input!

“You know what we get to do today, Brooks? …

Mark — Thu, 26 Jan 2006 22:34:26 +0000

… We get to play baseball!”

That quote, from Dennis Quaid’s Jimmy Morris character in Disney’s The Rookie, captures pretty well how I feel about going to work when working on something interesting. I can’t believe I get paid to do something so much fun. I wake up early, stay late and generally become a technology-focused dweeb at least until I get past the fun figure-out-how-to-do-something-totally-new phase.

I do feel incredibly lucky to have a job that I like almost all of the time. It’s even better when that job happens to be in town and doesn’t involve too many frequent filer miles.